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Constance La Le:nￚ Constance La ing in white (top), then dyeing_ Her line also incl co, linen ticking, and checks_ The Sun clude the furniture-check linens s flow at right. brown wool blanket and linen sheets," she recalls. For another part of the exhibition"reproduction furniture that was Cromwellian in style-the museum used my fabrics for cushions, curtains, table coverings, and upholstery. bright green worsted wool." Even though she rises at 5 a.m., La Lena could not do this amount of work alone. She subcontracts work to local weavers she has trained. And like Mather, she runs her studio like a small mill. "One thing that might not be obvious is 1 that most of my fabrics are woven white," she explains. This allows her to maintain an inventory of many types of fabrics and still fill custom orders by dyeing, which she does in big vats out-of-doors. She du- June/July 1986 Le:nￚ abriￚhown udestom abriￚ can offer f (above) in 34 cus er Studio's period f wove hundreds of yards of and because colors by weav- striped cotton calis in- plicates the hues of colonial-era natural dyes with colorfast synthetics she's formulated herself. Mistrusting commercial preparations, she learned dye chemistry and developed her own palettes of acid dyes for wool and silk and fiber-reactives for linen and cotton. Another thing is that eight different yarns," says La Lena. "Everything with them designing is very easy. She deals with a complicated threading by saving it. Her countermarch looms permit her to remove the warp beam, harnesses, and reed as a unit and substitute a second set for the next project. Later she can replace the original harnesses and reed, tie a 1 1 1 new warp to the old, and draw it through the already-threaded unit. La Lena describes her business as "selfsupporting," and life on her 21/2 acres as "comfortable." She says, "I don't take a regular paycheck, but use only seven or do is a combination of those yarns, am so thoroughly familiar on an annual basis, salary, plus expenses, plus profits for reinvestment are there." She is aware that her schedule would break a less driven individual, admitting, "I don't have the same sense of leisure time as most people." And what does she do to relax? Sometimes she gets away for weekends with her husband (they have no children). Most of the time she knits. 1 Joanne Mattera, who lives in Manhattan, is a contributing editor of Threads magazine. D 53 need to know that, weaving darrw,sk at the drawlocnn.